


Widow's Bite

by FannyT



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Community: avengerkink, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 22:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FannyT/pseuds/FannyT
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She doesn't mind the myths. They keep her safe. As long as everyone thinks that her sort will crumble to dust in the sun and die of garlic, they won't suspect her.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Widow's Bite

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for a prompt on avengerkink round 19, found [here](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/16524.html?thread=36465548#t36465548).

She sees the looks the others on the team give her and Clint. She understands their thinking. Human minds are so limited—they can't understand people without placing them in boxes, and they have so very few of those boxes to go on. 

So she knows what they believe. It's all too easy for them to jump straight to romance, when they see Clint entering her room. 

(But they wouldn't want the kisses she gives him.)

* * *

Before she met Clint, she was an assassin—an extremely prolific one. Her handlers called it enthusiasm, and dread clung to her name like shadows and blood. 

They didn't understand. Every man and woman killed on the job meant that she wouldn't have to hunt out there, on the streets, among the more or less innocent. She stilled her hunger on those she told herself were more deserving of it, and so she managed to keep the nightmares at bay. 

Now she has Clint. His blood tastes sweet and calm, willingly given—not like the ones she can still remember, the ones whose blood was sharp with panic and screams and death. She still wakes up sometimes, gasping for breath she no longer needs, fighting off imaginary accusing, grasping, dead hands. Clint is there beside her, then, holding and calming her, his heartbeat a steady, calming rhythm to anchor her and protect her from the scores and scores of dead faces. 

The team knows her past, and they know she killed, of course. They don't know how. And she hopes they never find out how many.

* * *

They are all aware that she became who she is now in the Red Room. They don't know what gave the room its name.

* * *

There is no battle between her and the sun. She's quite pale, her remaining blood only sluggish in her dead body, but she can walk in daylight and religious symbols don't bother her. There are so many myths about her kind, and so very few are true. 

She doesn't mind the myths, though. They keep her safe. As long as everyone thinks that her sort will crumble to dust in the sun and die of garlic, they won't suspect her. 

Tony quipped about vampirism once, when they exited a dark building suddenly during a mission and she squinted at the bright sunlight, throwing her hand up above her eyes. She laughed, used to the joke, but Clint stumbled and stared, panicked. He hasn't had her decades of getting used to the life, after all. 

For a moment, she thought he'd given her away. Tony was looking at her, not Clint, and the rest weren't paying attention—but Thor frowned, looking at Clint curiously. 

The moment passed, however, and Natasha relaxed. And then their lives took over, like they so often did, and there were monsters ( _other_ monsters) and attacks and fighting. That battle was not a very remarkable one, but one thing that did happen was that one of the monsters managed to get to Clint and knocked him clean off the building he'd been using as lookout. 

Natasha saw him fall, and knew she wouldn't reach him in time. She saw him hit a balcony and bounce off, and the scream clawed its way out of her throat as she ran, heedless of the battle around her. 

Thor was there, then, catching the unconscious Clint just before he hit the ground and carrying him to safety. As she reached them, he was checking Clint over, and Natasha fought back the instinct to punch him out of the way. 

Clint is _hers_ to protect. 

"He is fine," Thor told her, a hint of puzzlement mingled in with the relief. "We should bring him to a healer quickly, but—his pulse is steady."

He looked up at her as he said it, and she saw the age-old prince of a distant domain, the one who had seen so many things—saw him begin to wonder.

* * *

She can't do mind control, or glamour, or whatever fancy word the insipid human fantasies use, and she can't make someone tell her the truth. But she can hear heartbeats and smell sweat, and she can use that to see lies. 

She's an excellent interrogator. It's not about _forcing_ someone to speak honestly—that's crude and inefficient, a blunt tool. It's about just letting them talk, and building the truth piece by piece from the lies they tell you willingly. 

It doesn't come automatically. It's a skill—just like her strength and her speed. The Red Room gave her a head start, but she has made herself what she is today. 

(One day, the Red Room will be made to regret giving her that head start. One day, she will return with fire and vengeance.)

Loki was more difficult than most. His smell was different, not human, and there was ice in his blood. She had to work him hard, matching lie for lie and truth for truth to get the answers she needed from him. 

And Loki _saw_ her—knew who and what she was. He threw the red of her past in her face, smearing it all over her, shouting what she was for the world to hear. She thought they would know, then. But although the code was obvious for her to read, no one else seems to have picked up on what Loki was telling them. No one except Clint, of course, and Clint already knows everything about her.

* * *

The myths aren't always true. They aren't always false, either. 

After over a dozen of various villains and would-be warlords who have named themselves something or other involving silver, she doesn't take the names at face value any longer. So she isn't as careful as she ought, probably, when they are sent to round up a team of assassins for hire and one of them calls herself Silver Spear. Natasha scoffs at the name, finding the alias and the costume that goes with it laughable—but then the woman strikes with a sudden burst of speed and there's a spear sticking into Natasha's guts. 

She hasn't known pain like that since before she joined SHIELD. The wound is not particularly dangerous in itself—the spear missed all major organs and she would normally shrug something like this off quite easily. But the spear—the _silver_ spear, _fuck_ these people and their commitment to their identity, silver is an idiotic metal for this weapon—the spear is eating away at her from the inside out, and every time she tries to touch the handle her hands blister and burn. She's screaming, a long, uncontrollable wail and Clint decks his current opponent with a blow and runs towards her. 

She can't really tell through the red mist, but it seems that the rest of the team has managed to get the situation under control. This wasn't supposed to be a difficult mission for them, after all. Silver Spear saw her chance and disappeared, but the other assassins seem to be giving in. 

Clint sinks down to his knees beside her, gripping the spear tight. 

"Don't pull it out!" Bruce snaps. 

Clint ignores him, yanking the spear out in one decisive motion. The fire in Natasha's guts fades slightly. 

"Natasha," Clint says. "You need—"

"You've just made it worse," Bruce says, dropping down next to them. His hands are shaking, and he's pale. He's never seen her hurt like this before, she realises—none of them have. "We need to put pressure on the wound. She'll bleed out unless we—"

"Shut the fuck up," Clint says tightly, and Bruce stares at him. "You don't know what she needs."

Bruce looks astonished and hurt. Natasha would feel sorry for him, but she has no feelings to spare right now. 

"Natasha," Clint repeats, and she wants to say no but she knows that if she does, she'll die. (Die even more than she has already, at least.) She takes the wrist he's offering her—too weak to sit up—and she looks at her team and then away. Then she bites. 

She hears the gasps, but she feels her strength returning with each drop, and for the moment that’s all that matters. Bruce mutters something under his breath, and Thor says " _Draug_ " distinctly, but Clint puts his free hand to her temple, running his hand gently through her hair, and says, 

"It's fine. We're fine."

And for a while, that's all Natasha needs to hear.

* * *

Later, she wonders what she expected. Stakes, possibly. Fire. Wreaths of ineffective but eye-watering garlic. 

It turns out that Steve's disappointed face is worse than all of those combined. 

"How could you not tell us this?" Steve asks. 

Natasha doesn't look at him, or at the rest of the team. "I understand if none of you are comfortable with me on the team any longer," she says, her voice cool. She's been putting up a front of humanity for sixty years; putting up a front of emotionless calm is easy by comparison. 

Clint, still weak from the blood loss—he made her drink until she was healing, and it was a little more than she usually takes from him—pinches her leg surreptitiously. He's lying with his head in her lap, his jugular vein beating out its comforting rhythm against her thigh. 

There is no reply from Steve, and she looks up to find the rest of the team staring at her. 

"Why the fuck wouldn't we be?" Tony asks, looking genuinely uncomprehending. 

Natasha stares back. "I'm dangerous," she says weakly. 

"That's sort of the point of this team," Tony says. "You'd be a lousy superhero otherwise."

"I could kill you."

"I already _tried_ to kill you," Bruce points out. "I'm in the lead."

"I tried to kill _everyone_ ," Clint offers in a murmur.

"But—" Natasha falters. She looks at Steve, who sighs. 

"You have to tell us these things," he says, still giving her the disappointed leader face. "We can't have your back if we don't know what's dangerous for you."

"For example, it's good for us to know that you go to pieces if someone pokes you with something silver," Tony says. "Incidentally, I had bought you a birthday gift which I am now going to have to give to Hill instead. She's going to think I want to sleep with her or something. That'll be on your head, just so you know."

"I didn't _go to pieces_ ," Natasha says, annoyed. "And someone did _skewer_ me."

Tony grins at that, and she's surprised to see the rest of them relax, too. Thor sighs. 

"I feel a fool," he says mournfully. "I felt something was being hidden from us, but I suspected Clint. Somehow I never considered that _drauger_ could be female."

"Sexist," Clint mumbles, and this time even Steve smiles. 

"So just to be clear, can I still cook with garlic?" Bruce asks. "This is the kind of thing we need to know."

Natasha hasn't cried in over sixty years. She doesn't know if she still can. But she feels her eyes sting, and she believes that they used to feel like that, once upon a time, when there were tears in them. She lost her family when she was very young, and then found it again in Clint. She felt much the same then. 

Tony laughs suddenly. "OK, so I think I might stare at your teeth for, say, the next week or so," he says, waving a hand vaguely towards her face. "Sorry if that's very rude in the vampire community or something. Maybe you don't have a community. Do you have a community? Sorry if it's rude anyway. Promise I'll work on it."

There is a moment's pause, as there always is when Tony forgets to breathe when he's talking, but then Natasha laughs. 

It seems her family might have grown.


End file.
